Research is a key activity to advance in the game Eco. It is one of the first challenge where players show their preference between collaborative, independent and competitive approach of the game. This article focus on few ways to promote research in a collaborative fashion.
For the new players out there, press z and look at the available skills : most of these skills need to be unlocked by crafting skill books and then learn from copies of these books (the skill scrolls). The recipe for the books can be found at a research table, made from a work bench.
Research begins by making research papers. These items are made from resources like stone and wood logs. You can see them as specialized pages in a book and the recipes for crafting skill books require certain types of research papers or pages. For instance, crafting a farming skill book requires gathering papers and geology paper.
Once a book is made on the server, there is no need to make another. New players frequently loose time by crafting duplicate of books. All you need is for the owner of the book to click on it and make an unlimited amount of skill scrolls items. Finally, clicking on a scroll makes you learn the skill and you will be considered to be level 0 with that skill.
The first reason to learn a skill is because you want to specialize in it. Learning a skill gets you to lvl 0, but it is a mandatory step before you can spend a specialization star on it and reach lvl 1. After specialization, you'll get most of the benefits that comes with the skill. Is it important to note here that in a game with normal collaboration settings, you get new specialization stars slowly over time (real life days) and you can typically plan to get 4 start within few days, then get 3 other stars at an even slower pace until the asteroid is destroyed. I have a tool here if you want to plan your skills alone or with friends.
Next, learning skills is useful since you get 5 land papers each time. This is the main way to get land papers. The others are using admin cheats to create land papers or getting them from other players : getting the paper items (ex.: trade), buying land at the real estate desk, salvage from abandoned lands and seizing lands with a law.
Last, but not least, contributing to research is a way to contribute to your community. When other players are getting the skills they want, it keeps their interest in the game and allow them to craft useful things for everyone. Keeping peoples' motivation high and collaborate even if you don't see immediate benefits are both invisible, but crucial challenges of Eco.
Making profits with research is harder than it looks. What you need to do is make a book alone or with your friends and sell the scrolls for a fraction of the resources. After few trades, you might be able to get back your investment (which is excellent) and start making profits. After all, it seems pretty logic to think that everyone will want to bring you resources if they get the scroll for just a small portion of the price of the book.
However there are several challenges to this. First, a price that is too high is likely to trigger competition and other players will attempt to make their own book and sell the scrolls too. This trigger price seems quite low and I would say 15-20% of the original price of the books is a high target. Even so, Eco is a collaborative game and instead of giving you resources that you will use for your personal projects, another group of players might just pool their resources and make the books for themselves or even make a public library. This seems unproductive, but Eco is a game : making a skill book together is fun and fun has a high value here. Some players and teams are just independent or too far and will make the books anyway. Also, I have seen admins frown upon players who systematically make every books alone and then try to make money out of it. This is because trying to make money out of research is frequently associated with behaviors (ex.: rushers) that create economic inequity and make people leave.
Even if you are lucky and make profits, most of the early books are not that costly. In fact, without any upgrade module, the cost of the 8 first basic skill books is about the same amount of resources as an expert player, with food in his backpack, would get in 30 minutes. The other books (ex.: smelting, pottery, glassworking, cooking, etc.) have a higher value. However, some players will stop to learn every skill at this point, so your customer pool will be smaller. The industrial and later books are so costly that they will likely be made by organized communities or smaller groups that have a lot of time to play. With such high value and most probably a lot of abandon on the server since the beginning, you will have even less customers.
The best you can hope with research is to sell your scrolls to get back a portion of your investment, which is excellent. Once again, you might get lucky (and probably hurt the server as well), but there are many scenarios where you don't get much. And what I learned from experience is your trading attempt might cost you a bigger opportunity : create meaningful links with other players through community research.
Community research is a general approach where you aim to make research efforts as open as possible. Scrolls sold afterward fund toward public projects and contribute to the wealth of the server instead of the wealth of a single player. Consider for example the basic research carpentry, masonry, farming, basic engineering and butchery. They require a total of 20 research papers to make. If you have 10 active people on the server, each person can easily make 2 papers within minutes, learn every basic skills and get 25 land papers in the process. Once the scrolls are available, you can sell them for cheap at a public library store and give them for free to those who made a direct contribution.
You may argue that it's not that useful to get through all the trouble to coordinate research with strangers since skills books are easy to make. However, the number of research papers needed for skill books is always increasing. After these basic skills, the next 4 books are made with 53 research papers (double, but it's fine). After that the next 5 skill books of the iron era (pottery, glassworking, cooking, etc.) require 145 research papers. The next 5 are 375, then 480. The first books require basic papers, but the later ones are crafted with advanced and modern research papers, which are more complex to make. Basically, it might seems useless to work together to make research at the beginning, but unlocking every skill will require 1073 research papers of increasing complexity: collaboration is the solution. Working together since the beginning is a way to practice your collaboration mechanisms for research in a context where there is little risk.
Additionally, servers who don't tackle collaborative research early are worlds where players are researching books alone or within small close teams. This means a culture of independence/competition rather that collaboration is developing on your server. I always think it is a red flag for survival when pottery, cooking and glassworking are not researched in a collaborative fashion. So far, every server I saw with this red flag were not able to recover from this tendency and died few days later or end up with an anemic population of 2 to 4 players.
There is another reason to favor community research. Some players play in a competitive fashion and will work long night to advance as fast as possible in research. They will either not sell scrolls or sell for a high price. If they don't sell the scrolls, you have an independent structure and these players will advance further until the research is completed by the rest of the community. If scrolls are sold for a high price, each successful trade will act as a leverage and fuel the gap between these competitive players and the rest of the community, which leads to further inequity. Whether they sell or not, if the gap between them and the rest of the community is significant, this independent/competitive structure will contribute to further economic inequity. Uncontrolled inequities tend to create revolutions in real life : in Eco, you simply end up with an empty server. Having a community research approach is a way to avoid this problem, harness the efforts of the very active players for the benefit of the community and make sure less players are left in the dust.
Here are some approaches you might try to collaborate on research projects.
One easy method for collaboration is to call other players directly in the game and ask them to bring research papers and resources to a common research table. Allow them access to the table directly or have an open container nearby that will immediately pick up the pages. Be precise, like research the 5 first books and ask everyone to bring 2 specific papers.
A small research hut costs only 98 hewn logs and can be made in less than 15 minutes by any player.
This method is easy to implement, but players who are online at the time have a clear advantage to contribute. Also, it will be increasingly hard to coordinate research in this manner with the next books.
Another, more inclusive, method is to start a book recipe on the research table, then go to the contract board and start a work party. There is already a good contract template for that and all you need to do is to select the research project and keep the line where the job is to bring research papers and the other one where specialists add their work. Also, there is a skill reward in the template, so when people bring 10% of the papers, they automatically get the scrolls.
In this case, it is best to make the research on a private table so you make sure players sign up for the work party before dropping their papers and get their skill at the end. Ideally, Keep a public research table nearby so players who cannot yet afford room for one can contribute.
The research hut in this case can hold on 2 claims and is made with 150 blocks (4 high x 3 x 5 inside) or 170 blocks (5 high x 3 x 5 inside) if you include space for a community store.
This is a good approach at the beginning and coordination is almost entirely done by the contract board. Players who are not online get a chance to contribute. However, advanced papers usually cost a bit more than basic research papers. Most likely, the players who want to specialize in the skill will put extra work at first, but this will be an increasing problem.
A more complex, but precise method is to make a store which buys research papers and/or resources and sell scrolls in exchange. This will require some calculations, however. Basically, start with the price of basic resources and calculate the cost of every paper. Buy these papers at the store. When every paper is in, finish the research. Sell the books based on the total price of papers.
I propose you to sacrifice a personal currency for this store or find a clever way with barter. The reason is people will usually contribute to common research if they believe it is a community project. Using the currency at both research store and your personal store prevents a clear distinction. Alternatively, using no currency brings other problems, since people contributing to research may not exactly bring items of the same value as the scrolls they take. This advice does not apply if you have a common currency: in this case, just link the store to a government bank account. Many players may even bring pages and don't buy the research, making this store an additional way to distribute money while making people work for the community.
Community research is most often implemented by admins or friends of admins. If you are like me and travel often between random worlds, make sure you talk to the admin about how research is handled before going further : research is a sensible subject. When few players recognize the leadership of a citizen for community research, it commonly makes him/her de facto the librarian of the server. Most importantly, make sure the library is accessible by at least two players, one of them preferably an admin.
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